I didn’t think my Sunday column trashing the Santiago Calatrava-designed World Trade Center Transportation Hub as a “lemon” would be a hit with the downtown real estate crowd, and my premonition proved correct.
It drew a barrage of on-the-record, demurring voices — polite but pointed. Of course, certain other prominent dealmakers said they agreed with me but feared having their names used.
A theme among those who cranked over the column was: “Cuozzo, you’re supposed to be a downtown advocate! Why are you so mean to the Calatrasaurus — whoops, the Hub — which you called ‘functionally vapid’ and ‘a void in search of a purpose’?”
Haven’t I heard that, as the Durst Organization’s leasing chief for One World Trade Center, Eric Engelhardt, reminded me (as others did in so many words), “The opening of the Oculus will bring tens of thousands of New Yorkers to the WTC site every day and interconnect world-class retail and commercial with more than a dozen subway and commuter rail lines”? Darn — I must have forgotten!
Larry Silverstein, developer of 3, 4 and 7 World Trade Center and the original developer of 1 World Trade, said, “It is true that the Port Authority encountered a range of challenges in constructing the Hub. But at the end of the day, the project is poised to deliver exactly what New Yorkers and top-tier business want — a dynamic retail environment and convenient connections to the 11 subway lines and PATH trains that converge in Lower Manhattan.”
Hmm, why did that sound familiar?
The most thoughtful rebuttal came from Mary Ann Tighe, chief executive of CBRE’s Tristate Region and leasing agent for both 3WTC and 4WTC. She found the $4 billion it took to finish the Hub “money well spent … on a public amenity that is meant to last a very long time and to reward [us] by its exquisite details and grand scale.”
Tighe took issue with my judging the Hub “before it is even finished. Would you review a Broadway show without the play complete, without the audience in attendance?”
She’s right, of course — yet the fact that the Hub is still in previews hasn’t stopped a hallelujah chorus of “OMG” puffery from appearing in other newspapers and on TV.
And a Broadway play wouldn’t open without a full cast. The Port Authority is opening the Oculus next month even though retail leaseholder Westfield seems to have no sense of urgency about opening stores that wrap the Oculus — which the 392-foot-long, 160-foot-high ovoid needs not to feel as solemn as a church.
As for my gripe that the Oculus floor is without furniture or anything else, Tighe noted, “Grand Central Terminal has a huge empty space but for the central booth, and no benches in that space either. But its poetry, its deepest beauty, is from the dance of people that swirl around it.” I’ll give her that one!
Tighe also challenged my observation that, except in blizzards, most people would rather walk outdoors to get from one building or train platform to another — “On a sunny day, people will happily walk through the Hub … because the great space lifts your spirits and shapes the light.”
It does have an uplifting effect. But it’s cloudy days I worry about, when whatever light seeps in through narrow vertical windows may remind you the Hub floor is not at street level, but underground.
William Rudin, CEO of Rudin Management, which owns millions of square feet of buildings in the city, including downtown, told me the Hub is not only “symbolic of recovery” after 9/11, but offers “major functionality in connecting all these major transportation lines.”
Echoing Silverstein, Rudin added, “In five years, nobody’s going to remember the complexity of the process.”
Downtown Alliance President Jessica Lappin said, “People have different views of the architecture, but I personally like it.”
Well, I did praise the Oculus as “an unthreatening cathedral of light” possessed of a certain “lyrical buoyancy.”
But the lyricism ends with a feature I didn’t mention — elephantine, science fiction-y entrance podiums at the Oculus’ east and west ends, which visitors will use to descend from the street to the floor.
They look like overgrown “Star Wars” props, as NY1 political director Bob Hardt noted in a Facebook response to the column: “Was Darth Vader photo shopped out of this picture?”